Entertainment

What is AWS and How Did It Bring Down Instagram?

[UPDATE: As of late Saturday afternoon, Instagram appeared to have much of its functionality restored for most users.]

Instagram has been insta-tripping since Friday night and here's why: A powerful storm in northern Virginia took out the servers it runs on.

Maybe you're wondering how a storm on the East Coast killed access to your favorite photo sharing app, which is based in San Francisco. That's because Instagram, like many major web companies, uses an even bigger web company — Amazon — to host its traffic and data.

An enterprise cloud-computing product called Amazon Web Services (AWS) powers businesses in 190 countries worldwide — "hundreds of thousands" of startups and mature companies, all told, according to Amazon's website. Pinterest, Netflix and Heroku are among the notable sites and services you may be familiar with — in addition to, of course, "your Instagram."

Some call AWS the Coke of the web hosting industry, so that gives even more of an idea of just how prevalent it is.

AWS operates out of Oregon and northern California in addition to northern Virginia, but only the Virginia facilities were affected in Friday's storm. Still, that's enough to have people wondering how they'll see filtered Saturday brunch photos, as well as enough to make "My Instagram" trend worldwide on Twitter for several hours. (Pinterest and Netflix were back up by Saturday morning.)

The outage to Instagram and other major sites shows that — despite massive hype and momentum in the Internet world — cloud computing isn't necessarily a magic solution for businesses' data and IT needs.

Amazon began offering the AWS service in 2006. It lets businesses host apps and websites, backup and store data, and generally run their enterprise IT. The idea — as with cloud computing in general — is businesses can stay more nimble by accessing servers from a remote location and renting space and capacity as needed. Scaling becomes easier and companies without resources for dedicated server hardware don't have to worry about that side of the business — until something like this happens.

One product AWS offers is called Elastic Load Balancing as part of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. This means a business can pay to set up EC2 service in multiple areas. Then, when service in a particular availability area is disrupted — say, because of a huge storm — traffic is automatically rerouted to another, healthier availability area. Then load balancing is restored once all availability areas are healthy again.

But if a company — say, for example, Instagram — doesn't have Elastic Load Balancing set up and has all of its IT needs hosted in just one AWS service area — say, for example, Northern Virginia — and a problem occurs, then it's a more serious issue. What's unclear is whether Instagram put all its data eggs in one AWS basket and in part brought Friday and Saturday's extended downtime upon itself, or whether AWS is failing Instagram entirely.

Mashable has contacted Instagram for comment, but so far not received a response. Amazon tells us it will release more information about the outages "in the coming days."

Alex Hazlett contributed reporting to this post.

BONUS GALLERY: The Best Instagram Photos Ever Taken

12 Incredible Instagram Images

Josh Riedel: "I love the way you can travel through photos. Maura (@folkfibers) travels the USA in her VW van, and her photos take you along for the ride. I like to imagine Maura pulling to the side of the road and leaning out her window to snap this shot as she's leaving the park."

Jessica Zollman: "Iconic photos of San Francisco landmarks are commonplace in my feed, but this photo brought a fresh perspective. I love the soft light, the haze from the fog and that there is so much sky."

Jessica Zollman: "I'm a sucker for cars, architecture and typography, so this was a no brainer favorite. I think the best part about this image is that, if you look carefully, you can see that the photographer managed to capture himself taking this photo in the shop window."

Jessica Zollman: "The marriage of blinding white with bright colors and a blue hue creates a sterile feeling to this image, and often appears to be iridescent as a result of the depth of field. This is a great example of how subtly editing with iPhone applications can create a beautiful image."

Josh Riedel: "I love seeing the world the way others see it, especially when they live most of their life in the sky. Adam Senatori is a pilot who snaps photos on his iPhone while thousands of feet up in the air. There's something calming about this aerial view of a farm in western Wisconsin."

Jessica Zollman: "I love when people share portraits of their friends or family on Instagram, providing a window to their lives, and this is one of those portraits that just demands you stop in your feed and look! The autumn leaves, her red lipstick and the orange hat all filtered through Valencia - such a beautiful blend of colors."

Jessica Zollman: "We couldn't leave out a cat photo! Weebee is one of many photogenic Instapets, and she looks pretty great in Rise. This is also a beautifully composed shot, broken up into three sections and perfectly focused on the subject."

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